Friday, November 28, 2014

The act of pilgrimage takes a number of turns across a
lifetime. Sometimes you embark with the
destination in mind, as medieval pilgrims did to Jerusalem or Rome or Canterbury,
and sometimes you find out (as I imagine some of those medieval pilgrims did)
that the meaning of the journey lay in the process, in what you encountered
along the way.

We have all heard versions of that simple (and simplistic) “either/or”;
it’s not much more profound to say that every pilgrimage is a combination of
both the planned and the accidental, the destination and the
getting-there. What interests me today,
though, is a different take on pilgrimage—one that arises from both these
categories and yet veers away from being comfortably either or both.

Sometimes you are on a pilgrimage, and you don’t notice
until you get there.

It’s been eight years since Rhonda and I made the journey to
New Zealand, along with several colleagues and a handful of remarkable students
from the University of Louisville’s Honors Program. It was a journey to be envied, if you asked a
number of my writer friends: a Tolkien seminar that included The Lord of the
Rings, then Peter Jackson’s movie treatment of the great novels, would be
followed by two weeks among the film sites in New Zealand. We carefully selected these students, guided
(at least in my case) by their love of the books. We passed over worthy candidates in a search
for those whose application essays showed a respect, a curiosity, and an
affection for Tolkien’s work, so in some cases the almighty GPA was less a
factor (though these were Honors students with excellent grades) than a passion
for the subject.

It was a good standard to apply. We chose excellent company—bright and
creative, irreverent and intellectually engaged. I don’t remember what the grades were (A’s
and B’s, no doubt), but I remember the people and their work with fondness, as
the class evolved into a mutual labor of love.

The trip was, as you might imagine, a kind of crown to the
experience. Yes, they were supposed to
work in New Zealand, but I kept assignments feather-light, the idea being to
leave them to their resources, to let them become a Fellowship. All disciplinary matters were in the capable
hands of my colleagues, John Richardson and Luke Buckman, and to this day I
have no idea whether any student was upbraided or even corrected.

The travel experience was not uniform. There was pleasant and funny testament to
this (one young woman boarded an airplane for the first time, and her exuberant
whoop when it lifted off the ground kept me smiling from Louisville to Chicago on
the first short leg of the journey), and there were circumstances more perilous
and accidental: my passport was “inquired into,” as my name is not the most
uncommon in the world, and one young man implied, loudly and teasingly and in
the middle of LAX airport, that the inquiry had to do with “alleged connections
to the IRA”. Those connections were so
deeply alleged that he had made them up on the spot, but the post 9/11
discomfort in an international airport was, believe me, very real.

Despite my close brush with cavity search, the rest of the
trip to our destination went according to plan.
And here we return to the subject at hand, because it was on a hilly
little farm near Matamata on New Zealand’s North Island that it became clear to
me how I had been a pilgrim all along.

Some of you may know this story, but when I was fourteen, a
baseball injury placed me on my back, more or less, for an entire summer. It turned out that the problem rose from my
having a mild and undetected spina bifida, apparently more common in our region
than was known at that time, mostly (oddly enough) in males of Welsh
descent. While I was laid up, my cousins
Tom and Gary (two other males of Welsh descent) introduced me to the trilogy in
the hopes that a long book could tide me over in a long, inactive summer.

It did just that. And
in addition, it redefined me, as epiphanies are supposed to do.

The revelation came for me, as I will tell in the next entry,
in the third chapter of The Fellowship of
the Ring. For now, it is better to
consider where it led me. For after
having read the trilogy, I knew that my story would center on stories, on
reading them and telling them. I would
discover in the years to come that stories were my principal way of
understanding the world, of vesting it with meanings both evident and veiled,
both communal and deeply private. Myths
were stories, after all, and through telling tales we brush the edge of myth,
even now in a world where the most simplistic among us pride themselves in
being myth-free.

It was a lesson I took with me, through college and graduate
school, to my stay in publishing and on into writing, through my conflicts with
fellow academics who considered the trilogy a “children’s book” without having
read the trilogy (or, I would guess, much children’s literature), and who
considered me (verbatim) “not a real writer” for embracing Tolkien, heroic fantasy,
speculative fiction in all its shapes and forms. Things have changed with the academicians,
and with me as well, because it took me a while to realize that my journey and
its branching, resultant conflicts were all pilgrimage as well.

On the Matamata farm it hit me. This was a place Jackson had negotiated with
a sheep farmer, who refused to speak to the eminent director until a contested
televised rugby game was complete. This
was the place that housed the movie’s version of Bilbo’s Party Oak and the
opening scenes set in the Shire. Green
slopes tumbled down to a fence row and a small, weedy pond not much bigger than
the one in my grandfather’s east field, visible from the house in which I had
read much of Two Towers. The smell rose in the warm December air,
fragrant and fresh, though there were sheep turds underfoot you’d have to watch
for. One of the students sat on the
slope above what had once been Bag End, which was now a white oval framework
bedded in the bright green of the hill, and he leaned on his knees, quiet and
teary, on the edge of being overwhelmed by his emotions, fixed to this spot he
was no doubt coloring and peopling in his memory and imagination.

I sat down by him, put my arm around his shoulders. Cautioned him that, if he started to cry, I
would, too. We looked off to the west,
at the tree and the pond, each imagining a different Shire that was our mutual
destination and home. One of the young
women produced a recorder and began to play the soft, solitary theme song of
Jackson’s trilogy, and it never sounded so good and so lonely and so
transformingly communal.

It was, indeed, the stuff of pilgrimage. The search for meaning and healing, in which
the destination is less the goal than the place you set down the things you
carry.